by Laura Moore
In spite of the crippling pain tearing through her, Gen managed, “Yes—yes. Of course you need to talk to Alex. Listen, Sydney, you can stay and wait—he should be here in a few hours.”
“No,” Sydney said tightly. Wiping her tears roughly with the back of her hand, she drew in a shuddering breath. “No, I can’t stay that long. Harry would start to worry that I’d had an accident or something. I guess the thing to do is to come back later.”
“Sure,” Gen said dully, hardly listening anymore . . . as only one word Sydney had uttered truly mattered. “Alex will be here by then.” With the stiff unnaturalness of a robot, she opened the door. As Sydney stepped forward, Gen looked at her. “Sydney, I’m— I’m really happy for you. A baby, it’s a wonderful thing.”
Sydney’s mouth curved in a trembling smile and for a second her teary eyes shone with a luminous happiness. “I know,” she whispered. “I just hope he’ll know it, too.” Drawing the collar of her trench coat up, she slipped around the door and hurried through the rain to her car.
Gen stood staring until the BMW disappeared down the drive. Shutting the door, she leaned against it. How strange it was to feel the solidity of the wood behind her when her world had just fallen apart.
Sydney, pregnant with Alex’s child, oh, God, oh, God. The pain lashed at her in tempo with the words drumming in her head.
Alex was going to be a father. Tears began slipping from her eyes. He’d be wonderful. She’d seen what he was like with Sophie and Jamie: his endless patience and humor, the love that radiated from his eyes when he looked at them, the aching tenderness stamped on his face when he enveloped their small bodies in a hug. And he cared for Sydney, and Sydney in turn would fit so perfectly in his life. With a child to bind them they had a chance at finding happiness together. . . . They’d be a family.
But you love him! a voice screamed in protest. Yes, she loved Alex desperately. And that was why she was going to let him go. Because Gen loved him, she wouldn’t put him in the position of choosing between staying with her and being with his child. Alex deserved to share every joyful moment—as well as the passing sorrows—that came with raising a child. In turn, the child growing inside Sydney’s womb deserved to have a father who would be there for him. Gen knew she would end up hating herself if she were to come between Alex and his child.
And he loves you, the horrible voice continued relentlessly, the words like acid on her lacerated heart. Yes, Alex loved her. This last week he’d revealed the depth of his love for her in so many ways. He loved her so much he might even choose to stay with her, leaving Sydney to raise the child on her own. Gen couldn’t let that happen.
Oh, God, she would have to leave, leave this beautiful place that over the past weeks she’d come to think of as home, leave without saying good-bye to Mrs. Miller, the woman who’d generously opened her house to Gen and shown her nothing but kindness. Just imagining what Mrs. Miller would think of such callous rudeness had Gen pressing her fist to her mouth and biting her knuckles hard, fighting pain with pain.
But there was no other way. Mrs. Miller wasn’t due back until Thursday and Gen needed to be long gone by the time Sydney returned to tell Alex she was pregnant. A part of her wanted to run now, this very minute, grab Murphy and drive off. That wouldn’t work, however. Alex was the sort of man who’d come after her, demanding an explanation. Which meant that she’d have to stay and face him and make sure that when she left, he would never want her back. She would have to hurt him.
Oh, God, she thought, and clamped her arm against her stomach as a wave of nausea ripped through her. Could she do it? Could she be that selfless? That cruel? Could she actually bring herself to hurt Alex and destroy his feelings for her? Could she willfully destroy Alex’s love, what had become the most important thing in the world to her, so that he would be free to go to Sydney?
It was the only way. Her eyes squeezed shut, the agony enough to make her want to curl up on the floor and die. Instead she made herself stand away from the door. She couldn’t succumb to the pain yet. Not when she had only a couple of hours to pack everything in the studio. And in that short time fabricate a story cruel enough to make Alex despise her.
Alex had told her she was a terrible liar so many times.
He was right. She was lousy at deception. But today she was going to rival the most talented of actresses. She was going to lie and desecrate something incredibly beautiful, something infinitely precious.
And she would be damned for the rest of her life.
It had taken longer than Alex had thought to find a diamond that came close to matching the beauty of Gen’s eyes. Luckily by the time he left the city, the rain had tapered off, so the rush hour traffic hadn’t been more hellish than usual. He kept the Aston to a sedate-old-lady-on-a-Sunday-drive-after-church speed, his palms too sweaty with nerves to risk speeding. To calm himself he practiced his proposal to Gen.
He negotiated the rain-filled ruts as he drove up the dirt driveway to the house. Then he saw Gen’s car and his brows drew together in perplexed surprise. She’d backed the car as close to the studio as possible.
He parked the Aston and got out, almost forgetting to grab the bouquet of wildflowers he’d bought at the roadside farm stand outside of Bridgehampton, which was lying on the front passenger seat. Flowers in hand he started walking toward the Yugo, his frown deepening as he neared it. The tiny car’s interior was crammed with cardboard boxes. Then he spied one of her milk crates. Resting on top of one of the piles of boxes, the crate was stuffed with Gen’s paintbrushes, her palette knives, the heavy-duty staple gun, and some rolls of masking tape.
What was going on? he wondered as he strode toward the studio, his jaw clenching as he tried to come up with a rational explanation for why all of Gen’s worldly belongings were packed into her car.
The sight of Murphy, his mouth open in a huge canine grin, tearing out of the open studio door and galloping straight for him, momentarily eased the tension within him. Holding the flowers out of harm’s way, Alex gave Murphy a distracted pat on the head, and walked inside.
A single sweeping glance was all he required.
The studio was bare of everything except for the furniture his aunt had moved into it for Gen’s comfort. . . . Except for the painting she’d made for the hospital, its colors glowing even more vibrantly in the barren space.
She was standing by the futon stripping the sheets off. And though she must have known he was there, heard his and Murphy’s approach, she didn’t look over, merely continued with her quick, jerky movements, yanking the pillows out of their cases, and then folding the cases into quarters before dropping them on the other linens by her feet. That Gen ignored him, continued to fold the damned linens instead of flying into his arms, told Alex more than anything else—more than her car loaded with all her stuff, more than the jarring emptiness of the studio— that something was terribly wrong.
His voice held a sharpness born of fear. “What are you doing, Gen?” he asked.
She turned, her fingers gripping the last of the cases, holding it in front of her like a shield. “Oh, hi, you’re back,” she said, stating the obvious.
“Yeah. What are you doing, Gen?” he repeated, regarding her closely. “What’s with all the stuff in your car?”
“Oh, that.” A bright flush stole over her face. “Sorry,” she grimaced. “That must have been something of a shock. I wish I had more time and could break this to you gently but I have to get to the city. Jiri’s—”
“Break what to me? What’s this all about?” he asked, crossing the studio to her. At his approach Gen stiffened, holding herself rigid. “What’s happened? What’s wrong, Gen?” he demanded, his voice quiet despite the tension mounting inside him and the strain he could practically feel vibrating off her.
Her gaze dropped to her hands fisted around the rumpled pillowcase. For a second she was silent. Then, with a shaky laugh she raised her head, not quite meeting his gaze. “Gosh, this is much harder
than I imagined it would be. I guess the only way to put it is that yesterday I discovered that Jiri has certain qualities I never imagined. He stayed with me last night and was, um, wonderfully persuasive in making his case that I go with him to Prague.” Her eyes strayed to the unmade futon bed and a vivid blush stained her cheeks. Seeing it, Alex felt the breath fly out of him as if he’d been kicked in the gut. Pain reverberated through him. As from a distance he heard himself say, “You slept with Jiri?”
Gen shrugged. “As I said, he was wonderfully persuasive. We, uh, really clicked. Anyway, I’ve reconsidered Jiri’s proposal and I’ve agreed to go to Prague with him. With the painting for the hospital finished, it’s a good time to move on. Jiri’s bought an apartment with plenty of room for the two of us and Murphy too. I’m heading to New York now to meet—”
“How could you have slept with him?” he interrupted harshly. “What about us?”
“Us?” she echoed, frowning. “Oh, you mean the sex. Well, that was nice. No, actually, it was quite incredible. Quite an eye-opening experience,” she added as she casually began folding the pillowcase in half. “But then again Jiri is so spectacularly creative. No,” she said, with a hard shake of her head. “There was never an ‘us’—I realized that last night—thank God. What Jiri and I have goes much deeper than a summer fling. I’ve known him for years, we share the same passions—”
A cold fury erupted in Alex. His hands reached out to grab her, to shake her and damn her not only for betraying him with another man but for talking glibly about passion when he’d been about to lay his heart and happiness before her and ask her to marry him. But as he raised his hands he belatedly realized that he still clutched the wildflowers he’d bought for her. Stupidly he held them there, as if in offering, feeling like some pathetic fool.
For what seemed an eternity she stared at the bouquet. Then with a tight, artificial smile she said, “How pretty. But under the circumstances, maybe you should give them to your aunt. My car just can’t fit another thing.” Dropping the pillowcase she checked her watch. “It’s getting late. I really have to go. Jiri—”
“You bitch,” he said flatly. “I thought I loved you. Now I’m sorry I ever laid eyes on you. Get the hell out of here.”
Alex kept his gaze averted, refusing to look at Gen as she brushed past hurriedly. Hurrying, damn her deceitful soul, into Jiri’s waiting arms. In the awful silence, he heard her strangled whisper to Murphy, the scrabble of nails on concrete, and the quick fall of her steps as they left the studio. From the immediate rattle of the Yugo starting, he knew she must have run to the car. Just couldn’t flee fast enough, could she?
Alone, Alex stood trembling with the need to lash out, break, and destroy every last remaining object in the studio. But no damage he wreaked could ever match what Gen had accomplished with such cold and lethal efficiency. Without breaking a sweat, she’d played him for a fool and then left him with a shattered heart.
With a few choice words Gen had shown him that the love he’d thought was theirs was in reality nothing but a cheap illusion. Alex remembered how weeks ago he’d been sure that love just wasn’t in the picture for him. It looked as though he’d been right after all.
Alex dropped the mangled flowers on the floor and walked out of the empty studio.
TWENTY-SEVEN
With a short, lethal chop of his forearm, Alex’s racquet sent the black ball speeding like a bullet into the corner. Next to him, Sam Brody lunged, stretching out his racquet for a return, and missed the ball by a fraction of an inch. “Game and match,” he panted, adding on his next breath, “Son of a bitch.”
Alex ignored Sam’s curse, as he’d been ignoring many things these past weeks. By sheer force of will he’d buried the pain of Gen’s betrayal and then walled it off. He didn’t particularly care that he went through his day-to-day life with all the emotions of a cyborg. He was doing whatever it took to survive. The nights, however, were pure torture. That was when exhaustion overtook him, and his defenses crumbled. The memories of Gen he’d thought were successfully buried would rise up. . . .
Alex started, abruptly realizing that Sam was speaking. “Sorry, Sam, what was that?”
Sam shook his head and passed Alex a water bottle. “As I seem to be a glutton for punishment, I was offering myself up as a sacrifice. I’m free tomorrow for another match.”
“You think you’ll have recovered by then?”
Sam laughed. “Very funny, Miller. Hell, thanks to you I’m in peak aerobic condition. It’s only my ego that’s bruised. What’s it been, six weeks? And I’ve won seven games off you?”
“Five games,” Alex corrected, disregarding Sam’s veiled reference to the number of weeks that had passed since Gen walked out of his life, leaving him standing in the studio, his heart torn and bleeding.
“Right, five games. Like I said, it’s only my ego. So, you free?”
“I’ll check my schedule with Cathy when I get back to the office.”
“And how about this weekend? Any plans? You heading out to see the Duchess?”
In the midst of raising his water bottle to his mouth, Alex froze. “No, I can’t see Aunt Grace this weekend. I’m busy.”
“She misses you, Alex. She’s hurting, too.”
Alex flinched inwardly at Sam’s quiet observation. He’d tried, damn it. His last visit to Aunt Grace had lasted a full three hours. One hour had been taken up supervising the movers as they wrapped and crated Gen’s painting to transport it to the hospital. Hating that he’d been duped into believing the emotion Gen put in her art was real, when in fact it was the cruelest of illusions, he’d been unable to look at the painting. Instead he’d paced the totally empty studio—his aunt having removed the last of the furniture—like a caged animal, desperate to be free.
Once the movers had gone, he’d spent two hours in his aunt’s house, seeing Gen wherever he looked. From the sad, knowing light in Aunt Grace’s pale eyes, Alex knew she’d guessed he was lying through his teeth when he told her that unfortunately he couldn’t stay any longer. There was a weekend house party in Montauk to which he’d been invited. No, he couldn’t go back to East Hampton, not even for Aunt Grace.
“Tilly’s there with her,” he said, walking toward the door to the squash court. “I’ll go out and visit when things quiet down.”
“Alex, don’t do this, man. For God’s sake, hop on the next plane to Prague—”
Alex spun around. His voice low and lethal, he said, “If you value our friendship, you won’t finish that sentence, Sam.”
Sam looked at him in silence. “Sure, Alex. Whatever you say.”
Turning his back on Sam and the pity he’d read in his eyes, Alex pulled open the door. “I’ll call and let you know whether I’m free to whip your ass in squash again tomorrow. I’ll see you later. I’m going to the weight room to lift.”
As the door swung shut behind him, he heard Sam curse low and viciously.
Alex had regained his icy indifference by the time he made the ten-block walk from the New York Athletic Club to his office on Park Avenue. His secretary, Cathy, looked up from her computer screen and smiled as he entered the reception area.
“Hey, Cathy, here’s your lunch.” He held up the white paper bag and jiggled it. “Chicken Caesar salad, hold the croutons, and an unsweetened iced tea with lemon, right?”
“I’ve got to have the world’s best boss,” she said admiringly. “Not only does he deliver, he gets the order right.”
“That’s me, a mind like a steel trap. Any messages?”
“Dr. Williams from the Children’s Hospital. He was asking about the dedication ceremony.”
Alex opened his mouth to tell her to call Sydney and let her field the doctor’s questions, but then remembered that Sydney and Harry were still in Tuscany. They wouldn’t be back from their month-long honeymoon until next week. With a terse nod he said, “Call him, will you, please? Oh, and can you check my schedule for tomorrow?”
“Sur
e. Would you like me to fix you a cup of coffee?”
“No, thanks, Cathy. I’m good.”
Alex had just sat down behind his desk when the intercom buzzed. “Yes?”
“I have Dr. Williams on the line.”
“Great, put him through.”
“Hello?”
“Hello, Dr. Williams. This is Alex Miller returning your call.”
“Oh, yes! Thank you for calling so promptly, Mr. Miller,” Dr. Williams said. Pausing to clear his throat, he continued. “I was reviewing the guest list for the dedication ceremony and I was wondering whether you could tell me if Ms. Monaghan is planning to attend.”
Alex squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose, hard. “No, I’m afraid not.”
“Oh!” Dr. Williams exclaimed in dismay. “This is awkward indeed. You see, I’m afraid I had no idea how generous a gift Ms. Monaghan was giving to the hospital when she dropped by yesterday. I was rushing from one meeting to the next and hardly did more than say thank you when she handed me the envelope. Of course, it’s highly unusual to be handed that kind of a sum.”
“Dr. Williams, are you certain this was Genevieve Monaghan? She’s in Prague.”
“Oh, I hadn’t realized she was leaving the country. I see,” he said, his voice heavy with disappointment. For a second there was silence on the line. “Mr. Miller, would you happen to have any way to contact Ms. Monaghan, get in touch with her somehow? Ten thousand dollars deserves a little more than a distracted ‘Thank you so very much and good-bye.’ ” He gave an embarrassed laugh.
Alex’s knuckles whitened around the receiver. “She gave the hospital ten thousand dollars?”
“Yes—and we haven’t even started our capital campaign for the TLM rehabilitation center. I’m sure you can appreciate how awkward this is. . . .”
Alex wasn’t listening. Ten thousand dollars. A child could do the math. Day One sold for twenty thou. After the gallery lopped off its 50 percent commission, that left ten thousand dollars. Gen had obviously taken every last penny she’d received from the sale of her painting and donated it to the hospital’s rehabilitation center.